Skin lightening is about power.
It's an expression of power
and so people who lighten their skin
are doing this because
they are responding to a power dynamic
that exists in their particular society.
In many parts of the world, lighter skin
is considered to be more beautiful than darker skin.
It's a beauty standard
that's been around for hundreds of years.
Lighter skin has been associated with power and privilege,
and the beauty industry has been profiting
selling skin lightening creams and soaps
which are popular across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
By 2027, the global market for skin lighteners
is estimated to reach over $12 billion.
Skin whitening is definitely a huge business.
The patients look forward to have
a much fairer or a whiter skin,
and they could go to any lengths to achieve that.
The history of skin lightening here in the United States.
It actually begins with white women.
White women here would use skin lightening products
because they were trying to emulate beauty standards
and beauty practices that were circulating in Europe.
And then around the Jim Crow era,
what we see is skin lightening products
being used and sold and circulated
within the African-American community.
Black women would use this partly because
it would be a survival strategy essentially.
The lighter your skin was
the more access to resources you would have.
And so this is what made
skin lightening products in part popular
among more communities of color.
The idea was that
if you were trying to emulate the people in power,
you were seen as more civilized,
you were seen as cleaner,
and therefore that would give you access to certain things.
It would allow you upward mobility,
upward class mobility, et cetera.
When I was a kid,
I could say I was one shade
more darker than my sister.
And we both went to the same school.
Everybody used to be a little surprised when
I told them she was my sister.
So they said, how is there such a huge difference
in your skin color?
So I always had this,
but there was no pressure from my family members.
But friends and classmates
definitely did question me about my skin color
once upon a time.
In Asia, the practice of skin whitening
is related to colorism,
a looks-based discrimination that occurs within racial
or ethnic groups.
And in India, a part of everyday life.
Individuals who have fairer skin are more acceptable
when it comes to career or marriage.
If you also go to the matrimonial columns
in the newspapers or magazines,
they say, I look for a fairer bride,
or there are women who look for a fairer groom.
So it's equal.
The desire to have a fairer skin
is deep-seated in Indian population.
Most experts agree
that colorism bled into India's caste system
where darker skin has since become associated
with Indians at the lowest levels
of the social hierarchy, who do manual labor.
Historians are undecided about the origins
of this color prejudice.
While some point to ancient migrations
by Indo-Europeans, Arabs and Persians,
all of whom had strikingly lighter colored skin
than local inhabitants.
Others note the more recent colonial rule
of the British empire.
The Britishers ruled us for about roughly 200 years.
The Indians were kind of treated very badly,
or they were slaves.
They worked for the Britishers for many, many years.
So they look forward to the British skin
and they thought that the British skin
was acceptable because there were fairer.
Asia is the biggest market
for skin lightening products.
The World Health Organization found the 40% of women
they asked in China, India and other Asian countries,
said they regularly use them.
In India, skin lightening
is a multi-million-dollar industry.
Around 80% of skin moisturizers on the market
are for skin whitening.
The most widely used was Fair & Lovely.
It earns more than $500 million each year
for Unilever from India alone.
So I used to see the product Fair & Lovely
even while I was a kid.
So it's about 45 years old.
It is quite popular and it's manufactured
by a company called Hindustan Unilever limited.
And it's a booming business.
Due to global public pressure on brands
following the 2020 George Floyd protests,
the Indian affiliate of Unilever
changed the name to Glow & Lovely.
In a statement the company said,
"We recognize the use of words,
'fair', 'white' and 'light'
suggests a singular ideal of beauty
that we don't think is right,
and we want to address this."
The Indian government has proposed jail terms
and fines for advertisements which promote skin whitening.
But that hasn't stopped many Indians
obsessed with lighter skin buying and using these products.
Something like this has been going on
in our societies for so long.
We discriminate people based on their skin color
and no one's saying anything about it.
You know, when you see the way it affects children,
it affects women, it affects men,
and they grow with that sense of insecurity.
It's like a journey we've been on this toxic belief,
where it started with culture,
it started with social hierarchies
and the media keeps endorsing it.
Companies they may not have initiated it,
but by endorsing it, by selling products
through advertisements that say that
you can be whiter in seven days
or white is better, if you're fairer,
you'll be more successful too.
The thing is they're using the insecurity
that colorism has bred to sell their product.
So you're kind of making money off people's insecurities.
And then we just lived with it and it's become normal.
Apart from using whitening product,
some people go even further,
receiving cosmetic procedures
like chemical peels or laser treatment.
In recent years, an antioxidant called glutathione
is gaining popularity.
While it's available to take orally,
many consumers believe injecting the drug
is faster and more effective for skin whitening,
but this hasn't been scientifically proven.
If they have a medical condition,
yes, I will do it.
But if they just want to achieve a skin whitening treatment,
I would refuse to do that for them
because the safety and efficacy of the drug glutathione
is not well established.
Glutathione is produced naturally
in the human liver.
In India, oral glutathione is approved
for treating skin conditions and for skin whitening.
But intravenous and intramuscular glutathione
is only approved to treat medical conditions
like the side effects of chemotherapy.
There are very few clinical trials.
There are certain drawbacks to those studies because
those studies were done
on a very limited number of subjects.
Also, the patients were not followed up
for a long term or a long period.
There are practitioners who do use it,
but it's an off-label indication.
But what has been observed is that
it's a very subjective opinion from the patient
in terms of how much of skin lightening
they have been able to achieve with the treatment.
So it's not necessary that if you administer
the infusion in ten patients,
all of the ten patients are going
to observe the same change.
Due to a lack of research and regulations,
clinics make up their own protocols
and set their own prices,
ranging from $50 to $70 per injection.
In the Philippines, almost 400 years of Spanish
and then American colonial rule
helped to reinforce the notion of beauty as white.
And so today, glutathione is becoming a popular alternative
to traditional lightening products.
When we look at a place like the Philippines,
people there will use skin lightening products
because they're trying to emulate
those who are in power;
they're trying to emulate things that they see on TV.
And when you watch, for example, Philippine TV,
it's inundated with actors and actresses and performers
who are typically light-skinned.
When you look at the Philippine government,
many politicians are either mixed race or light-skinned.
Marjorie Taguiling owns a beauty salon
in downtown Manila which offers beauty services
including glutathione drips for skin whitening.
The country's Food and Drug Administration
has warned against the use of injectable glutathione
for skin whitening,
flagging its toxic effects on the liver,
kidneys and nervous system.
But many big medical groups and small beauty salons
still provided with a price tag of up to $120 per session.
Some beauty salons or moonlighting nurses
even offer injections at home.
But glutathione drips can also be bought easily online.
So some take it into their own hands,
following online tutorials.
So for tonight's video,
I'm gonna show you how to inject yourself
with glutathione.
I would say that is unacceptable
because sometimes if it is injected in the wrong manner
or if it is injected in a huge dose,
it can cause severe allergic reactions.
Sometimes it can be a casualty or an emergency.
These videos should be totally prohibited
on social media platforms.
I think it's an issue of access.
The more available a certain process is
the more people are going to be curious about it.
These more advanced processes,
what they do is they create more legitimacy
for the practice,
but at no point do we step back and say,
why is this necessary to begin with?
While some are still doing whatever it takes
to become lighter,
others are beginning to embrace their own skin.
And awareness of color discrimination
has increased in recent years.
India's Got Color.
In India, advocacy group Dark is Beautiful
has been organizing workshops and events to fight colorism.
What needs to happen is change both within culture
as well as change from these external endorsements.
And cosmetic brands and businesses have a responsibility,
it's not about people want it, and so we do it.
This is not like some problem that we can fix overnight.
It takes several such movements,
several such campaigns like ours,
like the Dark is Beautiful campaign.
And so it's gonna take some time
before we can feel the change.
We have to ground change in structures.
So we need to see major reforms in education,
we need to see major reforms in government,
and we need to see major reforms in media representation.
And not just aesthetic representation,
it's not enough to cast darker-skinned people on TV
and think yeah, people are going to love their skin.
It's about how we're represented in government
and taking away historical governmental policies
that were created to subjugate people of color,
that were created to subjugate darker-skinned people.
We spend a lot of time grooming our outside, right?
We dress up, we want to be presentable,
we dress a certain way.
So I think what really will help us is mental grooming,
to keep telling ourselves every day that you are enough,
you are enough just the way you are
and every skin color is beautiful.
On the next episode of Business of Beauty...
Istanbul is arguably the world's most popular city
to get hair transplant treatment.
Before Covid hit, it's estimated that
half a million people came here every year
in the hopes of regaining their hair.
In no small part because of the quality
of the work being offered
and the price it's offered at.
But it's a lightly regulated industry
and with hundreds of clinics competing against each other,
the pressure is on to increase operations
and cut prices even further.